The latest update to Hokusai Audio Editor is out today, and it’s pretty packed. Everyone gets access to new features, and if you have the Pro Pack, there’s even more. Here’s what’s new:
You can now play back projects at different speeds – a “speedometer” dial will appear in the Time Bar, next to the Loop Playback control. Tap this to speed up or slow down playback. Note: This doesn’t edit the file (you can use the Time Stretch effect for that), it’s for listening to a preview of your project at different speeds.
On the recording screen, if your input device supports Input Gain Control, you’ll be able to adjust it by hand if you wish. Not all devices support this (either because they always perform Automatic Gain Control, or because they have a physical hardware gain control, such as a dial on the front of a microphone).
You can now import or export FX presets, either to make a backup of your presets library, or to send a preset to a friend, or another device you own.
The “Export Selection” command now has variants for exporting as .WAV or .M4A.
There are some new “Adjust Selection” commands. They’re available from the selection menu, or by using keyboard shortcuts. These expand, or shrink, the current selection so that it fills up/fits around sound or silence. For example, if you select some audio with silence on either side, then “Shrink To Fit”, the selection will be tightened around the audio.
In v2.1, Hokusai gained the ability to set the tempo for a project. This has been enhanced in a couple of ways. If you make a Click Track, you can tell it to match the project’s tempo. And if you change the tempo of a project, it will offer to resample or Time Stretch to match the new tempo (this doesn’t apply the first time you set a tempo – since at that point, it doesn’t know what the old tempo was – but applies to changes made after that). You can choose not to, of course!
A popular request: There are now a couple of settings to scroll the screen automatically to follow the Play Head while you play a project back, or your finger while you drag to adjust a selection near the edge of the screen.
The Projects list is sorted with the most recently used projects at the top, but you can now sort them by name or size (largest first).
If your device gets low on storage space during recording or editing, Hokusai will warn you. The first time it happens, it’ll pop up an alert with a link to find out more about managing storage space, but after that, you’ll just see a warning banner slide in at the edge of the screen, without interrupting your work.
There’s a new keyboard shortcut to jump to the Play Head.
The VoiceOver “Magic Tap” accessibility gesture can now be used to play/pause the project.
Many visual improvements, including clearer indication of when the record panel is recording vs paused; cleaner-looking menus; and warnings shown when doing something destructive (like deleting projects) are larger and bolder.
And of course various other fixes and minor improvements behind-the-scenes.